Vasily and Me
“Thus we look upon the geometric point as the ultimate and most singular union of silence and speech.” — Vasily Kandinsky
There is a room at the Guggenheim in Venice where time stopped for me.
Standing in front of Empor (Upward) — 1929, Kandinsky — I stayed still for twenty minutes. I was moved to tears. I didn’t yet know exactly why. I only knew that the canvas was telling me something true about how my mind works. That was my opening. The moment I understood that I could exist as an artist.
Point and Line to Plane came as confirmation of what the painting had already shown me: that theory is not an accessory to practice, but its driving force. That one can — and perhaps must — build a system of thought that guides the hand. That art is a mental act before it is a physical one.
It is 2026. One hundred years exactly separate my practice from the publication of that book.
In between lies a scientific revolution that Kandinsky could not have imagined. He built his system in a world where quantum mechanics was barely an intuition, where general relativity was only a few years old, where black holes were still science fiction, where Planck’s equation was just beginning to rewrite the very nature of light. He worked with light without yet knowing what light truly was — and still built a system of extraordinary internal coherence, founded on an “inner necessity” capable of making the soul resonate like a musical instrument.
I cannot afford that innocence. Or rather — it would be naive, for me, to ignore what physics has discovered in the century that separates us. Light is an entropic carrier. Time has an arrow. Information decays. Disorder is the fundamental law of the universe. When I work with light, with dissolution and resistance, I cannot pretend not to know these things — because I have studied them all my life, they are the territory where my mind moves naturally.
But here a question opens that I have not yet answered, and perhaps never will.
Is my art this cerebral because science is my natural language? Or because it is easier to build a theoretical system than to show emotions? When I stood for twenty minutes in front of Empor with tears in my eyes, that was pure emotion — pre-theoretical, immediate, physical. The framework came after. Perhaps theory is the way I process emotion, not the way I avoid it. Or perhaps it is both things at once, and the tension between them is precisely what generates the work.
I don’t know.
What I do know is that the founding gesture is the same. Vasily started from intuition and built theory to understand it. I did the same, without knowing it: I produced series after series, working on light, dissolution, transformation — until I recognised the latent structure that was already operating. I didn’t invent the framework. I found it, in the work I was already making.
Theory emerges from practice, but then becomes its mirror, and then its engine. There is no going back.
The distance between us is a century and a scientific revolution. He sought a spiritual vibration. I inhabit a present where that vibration has given way to thermodynamics. But the impulse is identical: to build a system for inhabiting the universe without surrendering to it. To treat art as a philosophical investigation into our capacity — human, stubborn, conscious — to impose local order on universal disorder.
Empor. The title, in the end, says everything.
I push my boulder made of algorithms and paper, knowing that entropy will win. And in this, like him, I find my happiness.
